Question to the Department for Transport:
To ask the Secretary of State for Transport, what assessment he has made of trends in rail passenger usage of (a) Coventry station and (b) all stations in the West Midlands in the last five years; and what effect the covid-19 outbreak has had on rail passenger numbers at those stations.
The Office of Rail and Road (ORR) estimates the number of passengers travelling to and from railway stations by rail within Great Britain. The estimates for Coventry station and the total for all stations in the West Midlands are presented in the table below:
| Coventry | West Midlands stations |
2018/19 | 8,207,914 | 167,321,566 |
2017/18 | 7,682,920 | 156,714,634 |
2016/17 | 7,377,584 | 150,596,866 |
2015/16 | 6,921,432 | 143,158,798 |
2014/15 | 6,252,888 | 132,420,618 |
Please note there have been methodological changes over the recording of these statistics so yearly figures may not be directly comparable.
Source: ORR Estimates of Station Usage (https://dataportal.orr.gov.uk/statistics/usage/estimates-of-station-usage/)
As the latest data is 2018/19, the published estimates of station usage data does not cover the period affected by COVID-19. Currently, all official statistics provide only insight into the national affect that COVID-19 has had on passenger journeys. The Department for Transport publishes the ‘Travel use during the coronavirus (COVID-19) pandemic’ statistics which shows the use of all modes of transport nationally and is updated weekly. These statistics can be found here: https://www.gov.uk/government/statistics/transport-use-during-the-coronavirus-covid-19-pandemic
[Due to the number of rows in the ‘Travel use during the coronavirus (COVID-19) pandemic’ dataset, it is not possible to insert the entire data table here].